The invention relates to a method for the segmentation of digital color images on the basis of color histograms. Interest in color image processing has grown substantially in recent years. This fact reflects the desire to render color useful as an additional source of information and is supported by substantially increased computing power and new knowledge in the field of reflection models (Shafer, S. A. Optical phenomena in computer Vision, Proceedings of the CSCSI-84, Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, London, Ontario, Canada, May 1984), (Nayar, S. K., Ikeuchi, K., und Kanada, T. Surface Reflection: Physical and Geometrical Perspectives, PAMI 13,7 (July 1991), 611-634). The so-called color histogram is an important tool which is used in many fields of color image processing. The literature contains descriptions of various applications of color histograms for color image segmentation (Celenk, M. A., Color Clustering Technique for Image Segmentation, Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing 52 (1990), 145-170) for color object recognition (Swain, M. J. and Ballard, D. H., Color Indexing. International Journal of Computer Vision 7 (1991), 11-32) and for three-dimensional reconstruction (Sato, Y. and Ikeuchi, K., "Temporal-Color Space Analysis", Carnegie-Mellon-University, Technical Report No. CMU-CS-92-207, November 1992). Only the principal components of the object histograms are investigated in these known works; various important items of information relating to the color histograms such as highlights, but also disturbing influences such as camera noise and overdriving are lost. The known forms of the applications of color histograms for object segmentation are therefore frequently not flexible enough to take account of different reflective properties and lighting conditions in the presence of diverse objects.